A displaced woman rests in Tawila, in the country's war-torn western Darfur region, on October 28, 2025, after fleeing El-Fasher following the city’s fall to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Image: AFP

Katharine Houreld and Hafiz Haroun Families were gunned down as they huddled for safety. Young children weeping over their mother’s body in the desert. Doctors were seized for ransom and executed. Such are the stories trickling out of El Fashir, the Sudanese city conquered by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The vast majority of people inside the city are still unreachable; only a few traumatized people have been able to escape and testify to the horrors unfolding there. Sudan’s civil war, which erupted in 2023 after a power struggle between the head of the RSF, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, commonly known as Hemedti, and Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the Head of Sudan's Armed Forces (SAF), has become a sprawling conflagration, sucking in global and regional powers and leaving much of the country in ruins. The RSF is backed by the United Arab Emirates; Sudan’s army has received weapons from Iran, Turkey, and Russia. Now, a war that has already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives has entered one of its darkest chapters. The Washington Post interviewed nine civilians, doctors, aid workers, and combatants in and around El Fashir, who described a frenzied and indiscriminate campaign of ethnic killings an